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Big Data and Predictive Analytics Week 10 Blog Tianxiang Yu (Anthony) N8030715

Now the world has become into a digital era of information explosion, data is generated around us all the time. With the widespread popularity of social networks, each internet user has become a major part of data collection. Any operation by users on the internet, could be used to understand their character, habits, and even values. Thus, the increasing amount of big data affects and changes people’s personal life and work in some aspects.

  Facebook's director of engineering Jay Parikh explains the significance of big data: “Big data really is about having insights and making an impact on your business. If you aren’t taking advantage of the data you’re collecting, then you just have a pile of data, you don’t have big data." (Cohen 2012)

  “Big data” has been existed in the industries of science, military, communications, finance and others for a long time. But the internet is only rapidly developed in recent years, and the new media in film and TV industries is now just showing up its advantage. In the film and TV industries, nothing is certain. A film and TV production may have found all the great directors, actors and screenplay of popular themes, but the results is still unsatisfactory. However, prediction is power (Siegel 2013). According to Siegel (2013), “Predictive analytics (PA)-Technology that learns from experience (data) to predict the future behaviour of individuals in order to drive better decisions.”

  PA leads within the growing trend to make decisions more “data driven”, with empirical evidence. PA is the means to drive per-person decisions empirically, as guided by data. Predictions drive how organizations treat and serve an individual, across the operations that define a functional society. And, PA is a completely different from forecasting (Siegel 2013).

  American TV series "House of Cards" is a successful example of "custom" TV show based on data analysis.

It's presented and brocasted by Netflix. Every day, Netflix user traffic averagely contains 30 million users, 4 million comments, 3 million searching requests. From the audience insight, targeting, every step is guided by accurate and detailed data analysis, which is decision produced by user demand (Armina 2013).

YouTube Video: The Risk Behind Netflix's Original Programming Leap

  It seems that Netflix knows what audience like to see. From their database, they have been known audience like director David Fincher’s film, Kevin Spacey’s performance, British version of "House of Cards" (running 1990) is popular.

Eventually, what to film, who is gonna direct, who is gonna act, how to broadcast, all the decisions are made by millions of audience’s personal preferences (Carr 2013). Netflix's former VP of communications Steve Swasey said “We don’t have to spend millions to get people to tune into this, through our algorithms we can determine who would be interested in the show”(Ryan 2011).

  From a marketing point of view, excavate and analyse habits and preferences of users from complex data, find out the products and services which fit the "taste" of users more, and combine with user’s needs to adjust and optimize the product and services specifically, that is the value of big data.

References

Armina, Ligaya. 2013. “Netflix ready for onslaught: CEO; Competitors developing own services”. National Post, May 15. 

  Carr, David. 2013. “Giving Viewers What They Want”. New York Times, February 24. 

  Cohen David. 2012. “Gabriel & Co. is looking for a Social Media Coordinator.  Facebook VP Of Infrastructure Engineering Jay Parikh Talks Big Data, Project Prism”. AllFacebook, August 23.                                

Keating, Gina. 2014. “Myths and realities Netflix finds higher demand for old movies and TV shows”. South Florida Sun – Sentinel, Feb 22. 

  Ryan, Lawler. 2011. “How Netflix Will Use Big Data to Push House of Cards.” Gigaom, March 18. 

  Siegel, Eric. 2013. Introduction: The Prediction Effect. In Siegel, Eric, Predictive analytics: the power to predict who will click, buy, lie, or die, (pp.1 - 16). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

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NEW MEDIA POLITICS AND ENGAGEMENT Week 9 Blog Tianxiang Yu (Anthony) N8030715

New media as a rapidly emerging media, given the growth of the number of Internet users and mobile phone users, it has a major impact on politics. New media breaks the original "top-down" form of communication of accessing political message. New Media not only provides convenience for people knowing important political events, but also provides a channel for the people to be directly involved in political life, to express their aspirations. Therefore, new media has involved in the political realm, and has become an important channel and platform of political communication, playing an increasingly important role in the political arena. And it would also affect the atmosphere of public opinion on aspects of politics, by understanding civil needs and gathering wisdom via internet, that speed up the development of democratic politics and becomes an important part of political participation.

  Politicians now could directly propose and reflect their views via E-mail. An Example of the United States, the U.S. President Barack Obama sent his first political email to a large number of Internet users for help on 2nd February 2010. Its main core content is “I hope to sign the recovery plan into law in the next few weeks. But I need your help to spread the word and build support” (NBC NEWS 2009). The goal is to send a message to seek public appeal to urged supporters to "spread the word and build support" for his economic stimulus plan, given full play to the role of public opinion on the new media. 

  E-mail magazine is another novel way to help political parties, politicians to publicize their political views, to get more support. Widespread use of e-mail magazine began in June 2001 after the Junichiro Koizumi cabinet was formed in Japan, he launched his personal e-magazine - "Koizumi Cabinet E-mail Magazine”. This made his support continually rise in Japan. The subscriptions peak reached 2.27 million in January 2002. Since then, successive Japanese prime ministers almost followed this practice (South China Morning Post 2003). Such publicity costs dropped significantly compared to using traditional media. The publishing task is issued on the internet, so it does not need to pay any fees. If citizens leave their E-mail addresses to subscribe, you can get these E-mail magazines for free.

  SNSs is a prominent network phenomenon in recent years, gradually being recognized by more and more people. According to Shirky (2010), “access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation.” Politicians’ accounts on SNSs, mainly focused on some of the effectiveness of current affairs content, such as a personal political opinion, political aspirations and so on. Great portion of the world's heads of state use Twitter. This provides a convenient two-way communication for politicians (the government) to collect and respond to public opinion. The public could repost and comment on politician’s post of their political views and even their personal life. “As the communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena … these increased freedoms can help loosely coordinated public’s demand change” (Shirky 2011).

YouTube Video: President Obama Tweets from the White House

    Reference List

NBC NEWS. 2009, Feb 2. Obama sends first political email.

  Shirky, Clay. 2011 “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.”In Foreign Affairs 90:1.

  South China Morning Post. 2003, Jul 29. Koizumi takes the direct approach, by email.

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Traditional Communication and Mediated Communication. Opposition or Complementarity? Week 7 Blog Tianxiang Yu (Anthony) N8030715

With the popularity of modern technologies and it gradually integrated into people's daily lives, people's information dissemination and emotional exchange begins to be more and more dependent on the technologies, forming new mode of communication which is different from the traditional face to face interpersonal communication. This new mode of communication is known as Computer - Mediated Communication (referred to as CMC). It breaks the limitations of the traditional forms of communication, but it also brings impoverishment

  Face-to-face communication (FTF) as the representative of the traditional forms of communication, brings the interactive individuals to flock to a particular space, and thus the interaction must follow specific rules of time and space. Although after the emergence of landline telephone, to some extent it breaks the limitations of spatial distance, but has failed to go beyond the limitations of time. Connection and intimacy could be across time and space (Valentine 2006). When technology such as computers, and other Internet tools into people's daily life, the new way of communication CMC, makes the interaction and communication between individuals out of the restrictions of time and space. Moreover, with the development of mobile media and Internet technology, it liberates people from a fixed Internet location (desktop computer) to achieve the truly interacting anytime, anywhere. This breakthrough makes a qualitative change of the concept of space-time of interaction. Interaction of two or more parties is no longer limited to a specific time and place, but can send information to each other and get each other’s information in anytime and anywhere through the internet. To some extent, it achieved the freedom of space-time to interact

  Mediated communication lacks for reality of non-verbal social cues, that is can not be ignored. According to Baym (2010), “Mediated communication is seen as a diminished form of face to face conversation”.  In real life, interpersonal communication is face to face, but CMC eliminates many of the necessary elements of it, such as facial expressions, eye contact, body language, tone of voice, the two spacing, environmental effects, etc. “Computer-mediated interactants are unable to see, hear, and feel one another, they can't use the usual cues conveyed by appearance, nonverbal signals, and features of the physical context (Baym 2010)”. Mobile phone addiction is one of the most common problems of CMC. Nowadays, mobile phone has become an important social platform, you can see people head down staring at the phone everywhere or even when they are having social activities with other people in real life.

In this way, people will slowly out of his "reality”, and reduce "face to face" communication, living in a virtual world. Therefore, “Mediated communication may be better than face to face interaction for some tasks, but for those involving personal identities and feelings, mediation was depicted as inherently inferior (Baym 2010)”.

Please watch this YouTube video: Cell Phones Kill Your Happy

New media interaction is an efficient, convenient, low cost, and many other advantages, but the traditional forms of interaction still occupy an important position in social interaction. Whether it is a traditional interaction conducted in real space or mediated communication of new media in cyberspace, two different forms of interaction will interweave, coexist and complement each other.

            References

Baym, Nancy. 2010. “Ch 3: Communication in Digital Spaces.” In Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 50-70. Cambridge MA: Polity Press. 

  Valentine, Gill. 2006. ‘Globalizing Intimacy: The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Maintaining and Creating Relationships’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 34(1/2): 365-394.

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New Media Enterprises and Crowdsourcing Week 5 Blog Tianxiang Yu (Anthony)

With the rapid development of new media, many new forms of labour also born in the new media enterprises. Actually, people working in, with new media now in not very different. Cloud labour is now becoming a very common phenomenon in the new media. According to Fuchs (2013), Internet prosumer labour is a new form of labour that is connected to other forms of exploited labour which is unpaid or low paid.

   “Corporations reduce their investment costs and labour costs, jobs are destroyed, and consumers who work for free are extremely exploited. They produce surplus valuethat is appropriated and turned into profit by corporations without paying wages” (Fuchs 2014, 106). As the companies grew up with the tide of internet, from the outset, their strategy is to make full use of internet resources. The key reason is, crowdsourcing can help companies save a lot a lot of money.

  Crowd creativity

New media enterprises find a shortcut which is to find talent in the crowd. The example of Threadless could explain how the “shortcut” works. 

A T-shirt company called Threadless located in Chicago suffered benefit by designing new T-shirt with the use of new media crowdsourcing. The company collected the print design on their T-shirt on their website. The company's Web site received hundreds of pieces of design every week from amateur "fan" or professional artists. Then they put these designs on the site for users for rating and commenting. The top rating T-shirt design will be in the mass production shortlist (Chwialkowska 2012). Thus, the "triple win" situation was basically formed. The designers’ creativity be fully exploited, also their names will be printed on every T-shirt. The person with the highest score would win a medal and prize. Consumer’s participation and satisfaction were greatly enhanced. Threadless not only save the cost of hiring professional designers, but also obtain profit from selling those T-shirts with the corresponding online orders.

YouTube Video: Threadless / Make Great Together

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqEeYqg2kSg&list=PL9D033EC9B13CD91F

  “Thereby corporations reduce their investment costs and labour costs, jobs are destroyed, and consumers who work for free are extremely exploited” (Fuchs 2013, 108). Crowdsourcing is a way of publishing tasks through the Internet to enable enterprises to not require specialized recruiters, not need to set up a dedicated office space, which can save a lot of costs accordingly.

  Furthermore, I think it provides opportunity people to give full play to the role of human resources. The barriers erected between amateurs and professionals are to be broken by the new media crowdsourcing. Because the Internet is an international open platform, not limited by region, country and nation, etc. As long as you have ability to complete related tasks, you can become “Witkey”. It breaks through the constraints of fixed place of work and working hours, and maximum the range and the use of the human resources community. Consumers can directly input their own ideas. Then companies allow consumers to assess their own ideas after gathering the opinions by crowdsourcing. Finally, the implement "mass customization", that greatly reduces the market risk of the product.

        References

Fuchs, Christian. 2013. Chapter 5: The Power and Political Economy of Social Media. In Fuchs, Christian, Social media: a critical introduction, (pp.97 - 125). London, UK: Sage Publications. https://qutvirtual3.qut.edu.au/qv/cmd_common_p.show_item?p_item_id=212871

  Chwialkowska, Agnieszka. 2012, "CROWDSOURCING AS A CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP BUILDING TOOL", Journal of Positive Management, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 18-32.